The present invention relates to an apparatus to be used to manufacture thin sheet material including silicone gel material.
Silicone gel is an extremely useful material as a buffer material or a shock absorbing material. Silicone gel to be used for such application has, in most cases, a penetration value of approximately 50 to 200 measured according to JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) K 2530-1976 -(50 g load) and a small thickness.
In the conventional method for manufacturing a thin silicone gel sheet material as described above, silicone material such as, for example, Toray Silicone CY52 (trademark) (manufactured by Toray Silicone Kabushiki Kaisha) has been kneaded, transferred into a tray type container, uniformly leveled with a hand held spatula type plate, and heated with a flat holding plate made of metal or glass placed on the silicone material in the tray type container.
However, said kneaded silicone gel material has the property that it has a viscosity of 1000 to 1200CP when it does not contain other substances and 5000 to 10,000CP when it is kneaded with fine hollow particles and the pot life at a normal temperature is short and therefore there has been a problem that the work of filling the tray type container with this silicone material and leveling it in the container has been extremely troublesome and unsuitable for volume production.